At 5 chapters long, I actually expected this to be useless, but it wasn’t entirely.

Do not expect to come away from this with hacking skills. This veers between the very, very, basic (e.g. it doesn’t give the correct name for wardriving) and ludicrously high-level descriptions of complex technical approaches. However it should give a beginner a new awareness of security and just how many ways their system can be cracked.

In places it refers to complex concepts without fully explaining them: Http applications are not complex; for example, they include webpages. Chapter 2 forgets the golden rule – What is ethical hacking if you don’t have signed permission? ILLEGAL, so don’t do it.

The writing is alright – there are a few confusions of ‘login’ and ‘log in’ and some awkwardly phrased sentences. It rapidly goes from beginner level to mentioning things like packet monitoring without explanation of what this is or how this is done. A beginner should expect to get lost in some of the later chapters.

However there is one thing I can thank it for. It has been so long since I used Windows that I’d lost my restore and reset discs. The hint at the end to reset any Windows 7 password if you don’t have the discs? I’m using it. Depending on how your PC is set up that, at least, could be very, very, useful.

Too complex for beginners, and too light for experts, I’m not sure who this was targeted at. However it gets a few points for the useful windows tip at the end.